My manager is like this. I don’t know how to him it’s easier to talk about something technical over the phone rather than in chat or email. When talking to people about IT crap, you have to sugar coat and use euphemisms which I don’t have to do as much in email and the benefit with email is I can convey literally what I’m trying to do. My manager just doesn’t want to fucking ready my emails.
Yeah, why would anyone want to have a two minute phone conversation when they could exchange the same amount of information over 20 emails across three days?
Or like, you know, focus for a second and read the message instead of seeing text and responding only to first sentence, if not just the title xD
I find zoom calls to be much more helpful than in person. In person I have to bring my laptop, point to things, find a place where we can both sit, and probably send you code snippets over chat anyway, not to mention literally looking over your shoulder.
meatspace is deprecated, get over it corpos.
Depends on the problem. For design and architecture level, sometimes even data structures, a physical whiteboard is still king.
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im introverted but i actually prefer this than arguing over text
The best thing about arguing over text is that you can just ignore it!
Though you shouldn’t
I didn’t generally mind this quite so much …
Then someone just could calls me without even texting first… While I’m already in a meeting actively taking to someone else…
Fuck no
I need traceable communications
Send me an email, I don’t want to discuss potentially non contract and policy approved things over a medium that won’t record it
People, keep your communications traceable at all times
y’all need to just bluntly tell the people around you to get to the point, with that in place phonecalls are absolutely the quickest way to figure things out
“No.”
Crisis averted, can get back to fixing things now. The only way you’re getting me on the phone is if there’s some audio component to the problem (alarm buzzers or tones they aren’t able to identify) that isn’t easy to explain in text. Other than that, there are usually just a handful of common issues and you can tell which path we’re going down after a sentence or two of their description.
I begin every business-related phonecall with “I’ll want this in writing”, and end it with “please send me an email with a summary of what we’ve talked about”.
Guess what, the amount of phonecalls and complaints has halved, because I have proof in writing.
Exactly this. If it wasn’t confirmed in writing, it didn’t happen.
It’s a pretty standard bandwidth/latency tradeoff in my view: email is high bandwidth (it’s in writing, you can re-read, etc.), whereas phone is low latency (several back-and-forth explanations can happen in seconds). Each has its place.
If social anxiety is a factor, that’s a perfectly valid, but separate, issue.
email is high bandwidth
I don’t think the reasons you stated are about bandwidth, and considering writing an email is IMO more effort than explaining on a phone call and will take me longer, I’d argue phone calls are higher bandwidth than email - at least in one on one conversations, since things change when you want to inform multiple people.
Though of course what you listed is important, and it sucks when people refuse to write out basic details that you could come back to later or forward to somebody else.
I think my main problem is how disruptive it is to your focus. With text I can write a semi quick response then get back to what I was doing. Whereas a phone call requires me to drop everything and give a fellow human my full attention in realtime. It tends to drain my already small social battery.
Y’all don’t talk?
If they need to call me it’s either actually complicated, or (much more likely) they haven’t spent enough time to refine their idea to where they could just write it down.
Or they can’t fucking write. I’m a programmer and many of my colleagues over the years have been entirely unable to form a coherent idea into a sentence or paragraph. For a lot of them, that’s why they became programmers in the first place.
Nine times out of ten it’s the second one. I don’t mind being a sounding board for some people, but so many sloppy thinkers just don’t understand and don’t want to make the effort.
I often end up being a rubber duck.
Sometimes it really is much easier though.
Easier if you send it to me in writing so I can properly digest it instead of having it immediately spill out of my ears.
I’m with you on this. I prefer important conversations that require me to make a decision or remember something in writing. Just general conversation about what you got up to on weekend? Fine let’s talk it out.
I understand so many more people prefer verbal communication because it’s easier for them to not have to type or put their thoughts into written words. I just wish more of them understood that it’s not the same for everyone and come to a compromise.
Okay, but this is less of a question and more of me having 10,000 choices to make that I’m not actually allowed to decide.
So can you just sit on the phone with me and tell me which buttons I can press without getting fired?
Seems like a management issue.
Christ, tell me about it
You assume that you are talking to a competent person who has a real difficult problem, which is not the case in 95% of the time and they have some bullshit trivial thing that you already told them 5 times.
I used to be like this until I got a job that required constant phone calls. Now if I have to explain something using more than three sentences I’d much rather just talk.
I’ve worked as phone support for a year and I hate phonecalls even more.
I’d rather send an email with detailed steps and let people follow the instructions at their own pace. If they fail - remote.
Phonecalls are a weste of everyone’s time.
6 years of tech support and I dread email troubleshooting because I know it will take two weeks and 13 exchanges before we can actually start troubleshooting.
Hello otacon239, thanks for contacting lemmy technical support. My name is tja, I love dogs and I will be thrilled to help you today. I understand that you dread email troubleshooting because it will take two weeks and 13 exchanges to actually start troubleshooting, is that correct?
COMPUTER NOT WORK!!! FIX!!!
Hello otacon239, I understand that this is not what you expected and when a computer doesn’t work can sometimes get frustrating. My dog sometimes misbehaves and I also find it unacceptable. I’ll be happy to help you with your problem. Could you provide me the computer logs, electricity bills, last tax declaration, birth cirtificate in long form with 3 copies and the proof of Fermat last theorem?
Microsoft
This is the same as me. Outside of work, though, I’m the cat in the meme.
